Interesting:

Flake was supposed to sail through the GOP primary without lifting a finger, after which he would go on to to crush Democrat Richard Carmona, a former Navy officer and former U.S. Surgeon General, in the still right-leaning state.

But a new PPP poll out yesterday may have some Republicans worried, as Flake’s Republican opponent Wil Cardon has hacked 27 points off of Flake’s lead in just three months. Flake is still comfortably ahead by 22 points, but it’s nothing compared to the nearly 50 point lead he had back in February.

In Cardon, Flake is facing a surprisingly tough challenge from not only a political neophyte who has never held public office before, but a birther. When the Arizona Republic asked Cardon whether he believes Obama has sufficiently proven his citizen, Cardon wouldn’t say, responding only, “I think people who run for office … ought to prove that they meet those qualifications.”

The poll shows Cardon’s rise has to do with his growing name recognition in the state and while an early round of advertising certainly helped, likely nothing did as much to raise Cardon’s profile as his birther-curious comments a month ago, which captured national headlines and introduced Cardon to many people for the first time.

Flake will be a tough one to beat from the right–he voted against the TARP and he’s got a lot of right-wing support locked up. Lugar had some significant opposition from Tea Party groups but Flake doesn’t appear to have any of that. He’s certainly much more electable than Cardon. Of course, the past few years have shown that anything can happen, so who the hell knows anymore.

I actually think that there’s a decent chance that Flake could be felled, though. Not 50-50, but perhaps 1-in-5. Think of it this way: you’re a Tea Party Republican who is just sputtering with rage about Barack Obama’s plans to fundamentally transform America. You hear about two Republican Senate candidates, one who is an Obama-hating, anti-bailout, Jim DeMint-endorsed conservative who admits that Obama was born in America, and another who is just as Obama-hating, just as anti-bailout, but thinks there might be a chance Obama was born elsewhere. The choice here is between a candidate who hates Obama but basically accepts Obama’s lies about his identity, and a candidate whose hatred goes beyond those phony facts. Keep in mind that candidate number one’s longtime experience is a negative to Tea Partiers, and you start to see how it can happen. Of course, Flake has money and he will use it to undermine Cardon. Amateurs tend often not to win elections because they don’t know how to campaign, and unless Cardon’s squeaky-clean and surprisingly savvy, the money will probably work.

What is interesting about this is how the issue of birtherism has proven completely beyond the ability of elite Republicans to solve. They know it makes the party look bad, and Karl Rove has consistently tried to tamp this stuff down (out of purely self-interested motives, of course). But it’s been impossible to eradicate, and like a bad case of herpes, it seems to just flare up at random intervals. Now is not a good time for it to flare up. It turned Donald Trump into the GOP frontrunner for a week or two, lest we forget. Among Republicans it’s a powerful, if somewhat untapped, political force. I actually am surprised that we’ve seen as little of it as we have–it appears to be a considerable shortcut to shooting up in Republican polls. Perhaps it’s because it bothers Republican moneymen, but I’m not entirely sure about that. I think it’s just another installment of the Republican Party slipping out of the hands of politicians and other political actors, and into the hands of Limbaugh, FOX News, and online conspiracy theorists, and elite Republicans’ ever-increasingly desperate struggle to keep that from happening.